title

There is a certain show (I won't mention its name; it gets enough undeserved attention) haunting the radio airwaves. It purports to analyze and discuss various topics that are either strange or preternatural and, in the end, remain unsolved and unexplained. From UFOs to Bigfoot, to Doomsday scenarios to government conspiracies, this show features them all. The only problem with this "top-rated" journey into the unknown is that it's almost totally ridiculous and absurd. What it purports to "analyze" is, I think, based on the most spurious evidence and documentation, and what it "discusses" goes unchallenged and is "preached" to a mostly converted choir of listeners. However, it helps to keep everyone who listens within a constant state of fear and aura of doom.

When Steven Spielberg decided to remake WAR OF THE WORLDS on the heels of 9/11 and center the destruction chiefly on New York City, it was no coincidence. Why not have the entire place reduced to rubble and clouds of dust, instead of having it confined to a 17 acre section of the city?...as indeed it was. Have individuals portrayed as helpless and hopeless (via a Tom Cruise), overwhelmed by an enemy that's beyond their power to combat. (Why not go for broke?) Why not have pseudo-scientists on TV and radio shows, documentaries on PBS, predicting that the "End Is Near" when there's an audience to attract and a buck to be made with such talk of doom and gloom? Be it a 300 mile wide asteroid that could strike the Earth in the year 2010 or a volcano that will blow us in half by 2015, etc., people seem to eat it up and just love to be scared while unknowingly exploited.

In the 50s and 60s, sane human beings dreaded the chance of nuclear annihilation. There was no need for UFOs or the chance of an asteroid impacting the earth, and so on, to keep people entertained and frightened. Films like GODZILLA and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS were based on either nuclear or "Commie" fears, respectively, and these were all the fears people needed in those days. My neighborhood's local air raid siren was situated only a block or so from where I lived. In addition to running an air raid test every other Wednesday at 11AM, it wailed every weekday at noon to announce "lunch was served." I was terrified of that sound, unlike any musical note played on any instrument in the known universe, even on the chromatic atonal scale, (a "note" like that was up to no good!). However, with the end of the Cold War (if it truly ended) and that Commie menace, new fears needed to be invented in our new and improved complex world.

Fortunately for governments, with fear comes a desire for security and with security comes a gradual loss of freedom: a tyrannical control by those who are only "protecting" us from real or imagined dangers. If our lives may be imperilled by an enemy scheming to blow everyone to smithereens, PAY any price for defense and security; even if the same dangers that existed yesterday remain today and will only get worse tomorrow, everything is "secure" because yet more money is rolling in. If space agencies happen to be looking for an added 20 or 30 trillion dollars for their latest brainstorm, SCARE the people with tales of meteors that may strike the Earth: be comforted to "know" that they're working on some laser system that will save everyone and everything from those dastardly rocks, whether they're due to strike today or 300 million years from now. Scare people with reports of potential plagues that will ravish the world or solar flares that will turn our globe into a giant barbecue pit, and keep those stories of doom alive. They'll just exploit the fear, then sit back and watch the profits soar: there's always a profitable bogeyman out there somewhere, waiting to scare children in the dark.